The box score from game 4 of the American League Division Series in Detroit last night:

FINAL1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 R H E

NY Yankees0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 3 6 1

Detroit0 3 1 0 3 1 0 0 X 8 13 0

Ain’t she a beaut?The Tigers not only beat the Yankees, did not squeeze out a victory at the end of a hard-fought series – they fucking murdered them.They won the best-of-five series three games to one, putting a period on the Yankees’s season with that 8-3 victory last night, sending baseball’s richest team home to watch the World Series on their plasma HDTVs for the fourth time in the last five years, the third year in a row.Halle-fucking-lujah.

Now the fun really starts.First of all, I get another Yankee-free World Series to enjoy this year.No smug Derek Jeter smirks or A-Rod deflecting tags with a girly swat on my TV.Secondly, the Yankees and their bewildered fans get to spend the winter trying to figure out “what went wrong,” as though the Yankees losing in the first round of the postseason is evidence of the universe’s looming destruction.For the third year in a row, the morning after New York’s elimination has been filled with speculation that Joe Torre is about to get shitcanned.I’m not a fan of Torre (I was rooting for cancer), but the fact that he’s probably going to lose his job is proof of how insane the Yankees are.Let’s look at the guy’s record: the Yankees have not had a losing season since he took over as manager in 1996, nor have they missed the postseason.The team has won four World Series titles under Torre’s leadership.This year they won the American League East division for the ninth year in a row.Yeah, I’d fire that guy.

But Steinbrenner probably will fire him, because Steinbrenner’s skills as an owner are not what you would call “good.”Managing any other team to that kind of success would probably guarantee Torre a job for life, if for no other reason than he has obviously made the team a fuckload of money.But the Yankees grow money on trees in a hydroponics lab located beneath the outfield – they want success, and the only definition of success the Yankees recognize is winning the World Series.They feel entitled to win the World Series, and this sense of entitlement has warped their perception of reality.When they clinched the division a few weeks ago, Bernie Williams told a reporter that this division title felt especially good, because “this team has overcome so much adversity.”For Bernie, breaking a shoelace counts as adversity.

Anyway, I could ramble on about this forever and wind up just repeating myself.The Tigers and the A’s will play in the ALCS for the right to represent the American League in the World Series, while the Yankees, including that intolerable little punkass Derek Jeter, will once again have to watch the games on TV like the rest of us.The Yankees’s fans and team executives will spend the winter skittering around, screaming that the sky is falling, scrambling to explain how this mighty squadron could possibly have failed to decimate the competition, working overtime to “fix” the team, spending enough money to rebuild New Orleans five or six times over.And I will love every minute of it.